Gaby Hinsliff on getting a work life balance without losing ambition and why we need to talk about Betty Friedan

The Sunday Salon with Alice-Azania Jarvis

This week's guest is the journalist Gaby Hinsliff, former political editor of the Observer and now a columnist and writer for the Guardian and others. This was such a dream interview in so many ways - I've admired Gaby's journalism for years, and I loved her book Half a Wife: The Working Family's Guide to Getting a Life Back when it came out nine years ago. Examining the compromises men and women make to juggle work and home, and the benefits of workplaces taking a new more flexible approach, it feels pretty timely right now, almost a decade on. Now Gaby has written the introduction to the first ever UK ebook edition of The Feminine Mystique, published to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Betty Friedan’s birth. It looks at the incredibly important role she played in freeing women from the cult of domesticy - but also at more problematic elements of Friedan's life, including her homophobic comments. It's a refreshingly mature way to approach an historic text and I loved talking to Gaby about that, as well as about breaking boundaries when she became the youngest political editor of a national newspaper - and then packing in those 18 hour days to find (a bit) more balance. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

Buy the book: https://books.apple.com/gb/book/the-feminine-mystique/id1553757817

Edited by Chelsey Moore